Because we've already looked at a lot of GTS 450s including ones that are both slower and faster, we decided to just concentrate on the overclocking side of things on this one. Apart from those results with 1000MHz on the core, we've included the MSI GTS 450 Cyclone, Sapphire HD 5750, GIGABYTE HD 5770 and the Black version of the ECS GTX 460.

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Straight out the gate we can see the big performance boost on offer from the ECS GTS 450 Black. Hopefully this will translate well in our game benchmarks.